“This could be the greatest time of our lives,” John Belushi famously said to his frat buddies in 1978's film “Animal House,” “but you're going to let it be the worst.”

We've got a great NBA team, our yards are still green for a few more weeks, and we don't have to buy any more graduation gifts for a year. But between the toxic rhetoric of politics, the addictive distance provided by Facebook and a communal sense of insecurity, San Antonio seems like it's off its game.

Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? I shall now rant.

Politics was already bad. I covered the statehouse for six years and I didn't think politics could get any worse. Clearly, I was wrong.

And clearly, this is a cliché argument. Everyone wants political conversations to be more civil, but what they really want is for the other side to stop being so darned mean.

I was guilty of this when I was a full-time mySA blogger during the 2008 presidential campaign. I made people mad. They made me mad. It wasn't a very healthy situation. I grew tired of it.

As of this column, I am taking the advice of Joshua, the talking computer from the 1983 film “WarGames”. (Hair and music from the '70s and '80s may have been awful, but there was solid wisdom in the movies of those years.)

“A strange game,” Joshua told Matthew Broderick. “The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”

Playing chess would never work, of course, because then you'd have to talk to someone sitting in front of you and you couldn't focus on Facebook.

Millions of Americans would rather speak through an interface than face-to-face. It's OK when you want to stay in touch with family and friends far away. But why would you trade quips on Facebook with co-workers when you can joke in person tomorrow?

People will write things on Facebook they'd never say in person. Face-to-face interaction, on the other hand, has a nifty fail-safe mechanism built into it. It's called “fear of being punched.” If you cross a line, you get punched. People need to think about being punched every time they type something.

For the last two weeks, for example, San Antonio has worked itself into a lather over comments from my newest best buddy, Charles Barkley. You should see the hateful emails I've received about Chuck and about my columns about him. Radio guys are whipping people into a frenzy about this stuff. I don't get it. Why are some of you getting upset by some off-the-cuff remarks of an overpaid entertainer who admits he is clowning around?

Understand that Barkley doesn't live here, he doesn't come here often, and he doesn't know any of you personally. You know it's a great town. I know it's a great town. Who cares what he says?

Plus, many of you haven't thought this through. Obesity is a national epidemic. San Antonio is no different than any other city in that respect.

And why are you upset that Barkley insulted the River Walk? You can't be serious. Ninety-five percent of you never go down there unless you're entertaining out-of-towners. There are probably people from Denmark who've visited the River Walk more this year than you have in the last decade.

I like Barkley's insults. They get us to show that San Antonio people are proud of their city.